June222012

The shape and substance of our networked world is constantly emerging over time, stretching back over decades. Over the past year, the promise of the Internet as a platform for collective action moved from theory to practice, as networked movements of protesters and consumers have used connection technologies around the world in the service of their causes.

This month, more eyes and minds came alive to the potential of this historic moment during the ninth Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) in New York City, where for two intense days the nexus of technology, politics and campaigns came together on stage (and off) in a compelling, provocative mix of TED-style keynotes and lightning talks, longer panels, and the slipstream serendipity of hallway conversations and the backchannel on Twitter.

If you are interested in the intersection of politics, technology, social change and the Internet, PDF has long since become a must-attend event, as many of the most prominent members of the "Internet public" convene to talk about what's changing and why.

The first day began with a huge helping of technology policy, followed with a hint of triumphalism regarding the newfound power of the Internet in politics that was balanced by Jaron Lanier's concern about the impact of the digital economy on the middle class. The conference kicked off with a conversation between two United States Congressmen who were central to the historic online movement that halted the progression of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate: Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR). You can watch a video of their conversation with Personal Democracy Media founder Andrew Rasiej below:

During this conversation, Rep. Issa and Sen. Ron Wyden introduced a proposal for a "Digital Bill of Rights." They published a draft set of principles on MADISON, the online legislation platform built last December during the first Congressional hackathon.

On the second day of PDF, conversations and talks turned toward not only what is happening around the networked world but what could be in store for citizens in failed states in the developing world or those inhabiting huge cities in the West, with implications that can be simultaneously exhilarating and discomfiting. There was a strong current of discussion about the power of "adhocracy" and the force of the networked movements that are now forming, dissolving and reforming in new ways, eddying around the foundations of established societal institutions around the globe. Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, hailed five of these talks as exemplars of the "radical power of the Internet public.

These keynotes, by Chris Soghoian, Dave Parry, Peter Fein, Sascha Meinrath and Deanna Zandt, "could serve as a 50-minute primer on the radical power of the Internet public to change the world, why it's so important to nurture that public, where some of the threats to the Internet are coming from, and how people are routing around them to build a future 'intranet' that might well stand free from governmental and corporate control," wrote Sifry. (Three of them are embedded individually below; the rest you can watch in the complete video catalog at the bottom of this section.)

Given the historic changes in the Middle East and Africa over the past year during the Arab Spring, or the networked protests we've seen during the Occupy movement or over elections in Russia or austerity measures in Greece, it's no surprise that there was great interest in not just talking about what was happening, but why. This year, PDF attendees were also fortunate to hear about the experiences of netizens in China and Russia. The degree of change created by adding wireless Internet connectivity, social networking and online video to increasingly networked societies will vary from country to country. There are clearly powerful lessons that can be gleaned from the experiences of other humans around the globe. Learning where social change is happening (or not) and understanding how our world is changing due to the influence of networks is core to being a digitally literate citizen in the 21st century.

Declaring that we, as a nation or global polity, stand at a historic inflection point for the future of the Open Web or the role of the Internet in presidential politics or the balance of digital security and privacy feels, frankly, like a reiteration of past punditry, going well back to the .com boom in the 1990s.

That said, it doesn't make it less true. We've never been this connected to a network of networks, nor have the public, governments and corporations been so acutely aware of the risks and rewards that those connection technologies pose. It wasn't an accident that Muammar Gaddafi namechecked Facebook before his fall, nor that the current President of the United States (or his opponent in the the upcoming election) are talking directly with the public over the Internet. One area that PDF might have dwelt more upon is the dark side of networks, from organized crime and crimesourcing to government-sponsored hacking to the consequences of poorly considered online videos or updates.

We live in a moment of breathtaking technological changes that stand to disrupt nearly every sector of society, for good or ill. Many thanks to the curators and conveners of this year's conference for amplifying the voices of those whose work focuses on documenting and understanding how our digital world is changing — and a special thanks to all of the inspiring people who are not only being the change they wish to see in the world but making it.

Below, I've embedded a selection of the PDF 12 talks that resonated with me. These videos should serve a starting point, however, not an ending: every person on the program of this year's conference had something important to share, from Baratunde Thurston to Jan Hemme to Susan Crawford to Leslie Harris to Carne Ross to the RIAA's Cary Sherman — and the list goes on and on. You can watch all 45 talks from PDF 2012 (at least, the ones that have been uploaded to YouTube by the Personal Democracy Media team) in the player below:

In this talk, Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler (@ybenkler) discussed using the Berkman Center's media cloud to trace how the Internet became a networked platform for collective action against SOPA and PIPA. Benkler applies a fascinating term — the "attention backbone" — to describe how influential nodes in a network direct traffic and awareness to research or data. If you're interested in the evolution of the blueprint for democratic participation online, you'll find this talk compelling.

Mark Surman | Making Movements: What Punk Rock, Scouting, and the Royal Society Can Teach

Mark Surman (@msurman), the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, shared a draft of his PDF talk prior to the conference. He offered his thoughts on "movement making," connecting lessons from punk rock, scouting and the Royal Society.

With the onrush of mobile apps and swift ride of Facebook, what we think about as the Internet — the open platform that is the World Wide Web — is changing. Surman contrasted the Internet today, enabled by an end-to-end principle, built upon open-source technologies and on open protocols, with the one of permissions, walled gardens and controlled app stores that we're seeing grow around the world. "Tim Berners-Lee built the idea that the web should be LEGO into its very design," said Surman. We'll see how if all of these pieces (loosely joined?) fit as well together in the future.

Juan Pardinas | OGP: Global Steroids for National Reformers

There are substantial responsibilities and challenges inherent in moving forward with the historic Open Government Partnership (OGP) that officially launched in New York City last September. Juan Pardinas (@jepardinas) took the position that OGP will have a positive impact on the world and that the seat civil society has at the partnership's table will matter. By the time the next annual OGP conference rolls around in 2013, history may well have rendered its own verdict on whether this effort will endure to lasting effect.

Given diplomatic challenges around South Africa's proposed secrecy law, all of the stakeholders in the Open Government Partnership will need to keep pressure on other stakeholders if significant progress is going to be made. If OGP is to be judged more than a PR opportunity for politicians and diplomats to make bold framing statements, government and civil society leaders will need to do more to hold countries accountable to the commitments required for participation: all participating countries must submit Action Plans after a bonafide public consultation. Moreover, they'll need to define the metrics by which progress should be judged and be clear with citizens about the timelines for change.

Michael Anti | Walking Along the Great Firewall

Michael Anti (@mranti) is a Chinese journalist and political blogger who has earned global attention for activism in the service of freedom of the press in China. When Anti was exiled from Facebook over its real names policy, his account deletion became an important example for other activists around the world. At PDF, he shared a frank perspective on where free speech stands in China, including how the Chinese government is responding to the challenges of their increasingly networked society. For perspective, there are now more Internet users in China (an estimated 350 million) than the total population of the United States. As you'll hear in Anti's talk, the Chinese government is learning and watching what happens elsewhere.

Masha Gessen | The Future of the Russian Protest Movement

Masha Gessen (@mashagessen), a Russian and American journalist, threw a bucket of ice water on any hopes that increasing Internet penetration or social media would in of themselves lead to improvements in governance, reduce corruption, or improve the ability of Russia's people to petition their government for grievances.

.@MashaGessen: In Russia, @Twitter has proven "completely ineffective" in bridging the gap online/offline. Great for broadcasting. #pdf12

An Xiao Mina | Internet Street Art and Social Change in China

This beautiful and challenging talk by Mina (@anxiaostudio) offered a fascinating insight: memes are the street art of the censored web. If you want to learn more about how Chinese artists and citizens are communicating online, watch this creative, compelling presentation. (Note: there are naked people in this video, which will make it NSFW is some workplaces.)

Chris Soghoian | Lessons from the Bin Laden Raid and Cyberwar

Soghoian (@csoghoian), who has a well-earned reputation for finding privacy and security issues in the products and services of the world's biggest tech companies, offered up a talk that made three strong points:

Automatic security updates are generally quite a good thing for users.

The federal government could use an official who owns consumer IT security, not just "cybersecurity" in at the corporate or national level.

Zac Moffatt | The Real Story of 2012: Using Digital for Persuasion

Moffatt (@zacmoffatt> is the digital director for the Mitt Romney presidential campaign. In his talk, Moffatt said 2012 will be the first election cycle where persuasion and mobilization will be core elements of the digital experience. Connecting with millions of voters who have moved to the Internet is clearly a strategic priority for his team — and it appears to be paying off. The Guardian reported recently that the Romney campaign is closing the digital data gap with the Obama campaign.

Alex Torpey | The Local Revolution

Alex Torpey (@AlexTorpey) attracted widespread attention when he was elected mayor of South Orange New Jersey last year at the age of 23. In the months since he was elected, Torpey has been trying to interest his peers in politics. His talk at PDF focused on asking for more participation in local government and to rethink partisanship: Torpey ran as an independent. As Gov 2.0 goes local, Mayor Torpey looks likely to be one of its leaders.

Gilad Lotan | Networked Power: What We Learn From Data

If you're interested in a data-driven analysis of networked political power and media influence, Gilan Lotan's talk is a must-watch. Lotan, who tweets as @gilgul, crunched massive amounts of tweets to help the people formerly known as the audience to better understand networked movements for change.

Cheryl Contee | The End of the Digital Divide

Jack and Jill Politics co-founder Cheryl Contee (@cheryl) took a profoundly personal approach when she talked about the death and rebirth of the digital divide. She posited that what underserved citizens in the United States now face isn't so much the classic concerns of the 1990s, where citizens weren't connected to the Internet, but rather a skills gap for open jobs and a lack of investment to address those issues in poor and minority communities. She also highlighted how important mentorship can be in bridging that divide. When Contee shared how Yale computer lab director Margaret Krebs helped her, she briefly teared up — and she called on technologists, innovators and leaders to give others a hand up.

January202012

This morning, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), the Senate Majority Leader, said in a statement that he would postpone next week's vote on the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) followed with a statement that he would also halt consideration of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Collectively, millions of people rose up and told Washington that these bills shall not pass.

This outcome was driven by an unprecedented day of online protests on Wednesday of this week, and the resulting coverage on cable and broadcast news networks had an effect.

"Senator Reid made the right decision in postponing next week's vote on PIPA," said Center for Democracy and Technology president Leslie Harris. "It's time for a hard reset on this issue. We need a thoughtful and substantive process that includes all Internet stakeholders. We need to take a hard look at the facts and find solutions that honor the Internet's openness and its unique capacity for innovation and free expression. We are thankful for the efforts of Senator Ron Wyden who from the beginning stood against this bill; his early opposition and leadership gave voice to the important concerns of the Internet community."

Wikipedia, Google, BoingBoing, Reddit, O'Reilly Media and thousands of other websites, blogs and individual citizens asked their communities to take a stand and contact Washington. January 18, 2012, will go down as an historic day of online action. Consider the following statistics:

162 million Wikipedia page views, with some 8 million visitors using an online form to look up the address of their Congressional representatives.

Nearly 1,000 protesters outside New York's U.S. Senators' office in New York City.

The key metric to consider for impact of this action, however, was not measured in digital terms but by civic outcomes: 40 new opponents in Congress.

On Wednesday morning, according to ProPublica's SOPA Tracker, U.S. Senators and Representatives were 80-31 for SOPA and PIPA. By the end of the day, SOPA and PIPA had 68 supporters and 71 opponents in Congress. And by week's end, ProPublica's data showed 187 opponents and "leaning no."

"The amazing thing is that the power of these networks delivered," wrote Votizen co-founder David Binetti on TechCrunch. "By the end of the day, 25 Senators — including at least 5 former co-sponsors of the bill — had announced their opposition to SOPA. Think about that for just a second: A well-organized, well-funded, well-connected, well-experienced lobbying effort on Capitol Hill was outflanked by an ad-hoc group of rank amateurs, most of whom were operating independent of one another and on their spare time. Regardless where you stand on the issue — and effective copyright protection is an important issue — this is very good news for the future of civic engagement."

"Get ready to have this fight again"

Carl Franzen, in his must-read analysis of how the Web killed SOPA and PIPA, lays out a convincing case for why we should think of these bills as effectively "dead."

These bills are not completely in the grave, no matter what headlines you read today, although I can now say with confidence that they will not pass as currently drafted. In the months to come, keep an eye out for efforts to redraft them, cutting DNS filtering provisions or search engine blocks in an effort to make them acceptable to technology companies like Google.

It will be some months yet before Congress is "done" in this election year. No one I've consulted at the Center for Democracy and Technology or Public Knowledge thinks this is over. I'm certainly not convinced yet. The White House said that it would like to see action on anti-piracy legislation this year. Senator Reid had indicated that he would like to revisit legislation in February. It will be months until Congress really shuts down during the election year.

Clay Shirky made an important point today in his post on Hollywood and copyright today: "The risk now is not that SOPA will pass. The risk is that we'll think we've won. We haven't; they'll be back. Get ready to have this fight again."

Video of Shirky's TED Talk on why SOPA is a bad idea is embedded below:

While the power of the Internet to drive media coverage and collective action mattered in Washington this week, it's also critically important to recognize that but for the efforts of Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Rep. Jared Polis (R-CO) and Rep. Zoe Logren (D-CA), I believe SOPA and PIPA would likely have passed.

Senator Wyden put a critical hold on the PROTECT IP Act after it sailed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The four representatives proposed dozens of amendments to SOPA in a marathon, days-long markup session that effectively filibustered the bill, delaying it until the House came back into session in January. That delay enabled hundreds of organizations and individuals, including newspaper editors, human rights advocates, academics, engineers and public interest groups, to rally to save the Internet as we know it.

"Supporters of the Internet deserve credit for pressing advocates of SOPA and PIPA to back away from an effort to ram through controversial legislation," Issa said in an emailed statement.

The statement continued:

"Over the last two months, the intense popular effort to stop SOPA and PIPA has defeated an effort that once looked unstoppable but lacked a fundamental understanding of how Internet technologies work.

"Postponing the Senate vote on PIPA removes the imminent threat to the Internet, but it's not over yet. Copyright infringement remains a serious problem and any solution must be targeted, effective, and consistent with how the Internet works. After inviting all stakeholders to help improve American intellectual property protections, I have introduced the bipartisan OPEN Act with Senator Rob Wyden which can be read and commented on at KeepTheWebOPEN.com. It is clear that Congress needs to have more discussion and education about the workings of the Internet before it moves forward on sweeping legislation to address intellectual property theft on the Internet. I look forward to working with my colleagues and stakeholders to achieve a needed consensus about the way forward."

Unexplored territory

In the meantime, everyone who participated in this week's unprecedented day of online action should know that the action mattered. If you'd asked me about the prospects for the passage of these bills back in December — and many people did, after I wrote a feature in November that highlighted the threat these anti-piracy bills presented to the Internet, security and freedom of expression online — I estimated that it was quite likely. So did Chris Dodd, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, who told the New York Times that these passage of these bills was "considered by many to be a 'slam dunk'.'"

We're now in unexplored territory. I've been writing about how the Internet affects government and government affects the Internet for years now. This week was clearly a tipping point in that space. The voices of the people, expressed in calls, letters, tweets, petitions and protests, were heard in Washington.

We saw unprecedented mobilization across the Internet, enabled by an increasingly networked society, social media and a number of tech companies and website owners taking principled stands in support of freedom of expression and the Open Web.

I support the right of Internet companies and services to use their platforms to educate their users about proposed legislation that would harm a free and open Internet, as we understand that term today. It's important now that those same companies and citizens work together to craft an alternative to SOPA, as Rob Preston, the editor-in-chief of Information Week, argued today. The problem of money, politics and SOPA is a thorny one, as John Battelle wrote this morning:

"We can't afford to not engage with Washington anymore ... Silicon Valley is waking up to the fact that we have to be part of the process in Washington — for too long we've treated 'Government' as damage, and we've routed around it."

Just so. We need the smartest minds of our generation thinking about how to help make society work better, creating tools to help others do so and using them to help millions of citizens still struggling to make their way out of the Great Recession. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, there are more than 3 million unfilled jobs. Let's figure out how to fill them.

We need our elected leaders not to focus on big government or small government but a smarter government, more innovative government that uses the power of technology to empower civil society and the collective intelligence of its citizens to adapt to our rapidly changed world. This is precisely what the open government movement that we've been writing about at O'Reilly over the past five years is focused upon.

One of the most unheralded successes of this week's SOPA and PIPA victories was the role that pioneering open government and government transparency efforts had in enabling the protests to take off. Just a few weeks ago, few online had heard of either bill, almost no one could understand their potential impact, and even fewer had read the actual bills.

But thanks to efforts like OpenCongress, which routinely creates valuable resources like this look at the money behind SOPA through its support from the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation, the web was able to see who was helping pay for the law. Giving that information a place to live on the web was a fundamental step that enabled powerful demonstrations like the GoDaddy protests in which thousands of users moved their business from the company in protest of its support of SOPA. (I have some misgivings about the tactics and effectiveness of that particular protest, but overall as a first example of the organization and focus of those who would object to SOPA, it was inarguably powerful.)

There are incredibly difficult challenges that face us as a country and as a global community, from jobs to healthcare to the environment to civil liberties to smoldering wars around the world. If more leaders in Silicon Valley and the rest of the country heed Battelle's call, we'll have a chance at solving some of the problems ahead.

What happened this week, however, will reinvigorate the notion that participating in the civic process matters.

A portion of the Internet said "no" to SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the Protect IP Act) this week with a powerful campaign that involved many websites, including O'Reilly, "going dark" to protest the pending legislation.

The protests didn't just involve the temporary shut-down of websites, however. People were voicing their opinions as well. According to Twitter, there were around 3.9 million tweets about SOPA on January 18, the day of the protest.

Fred Benenson has visualized a portion of those SOPA tweets on GigaPan. With the tool, you can view top SOPA-related tweets and their associated Twitter users.

Check out the massive 32,000-pixel x 32,000-pixel version of the visualization here (be sure to view it in full-screen mode). Benenson has also put together a post that outlines the tools and process behind his work.

Found a great visualization? Tell us about it

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring visualizations. We're always looking for leads, so please drop a line if there's a visualization you think we should know about.

Strata 2012 — The 2012 Strata Conference, being held Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.

January192012

SOPA and PIPA

Although SOPA has had a setback in the House, it would be a bad mistake to assume that this story is at an end, or that it will end any time soon. And its evil twin, PIPA, still rumbles along
in the Senate. You've all read the arguments about how SOPA and PIPA have the potential to harm the Internet-based economy, and how it makes it nearly impossible to protect the integrity of the DNS,
virtually guaranteeing an explosion of malware. But I'm more
disturbed by the big legislative theme of 2011: rather than
rule-by-law and innocent until proven guilty, we have rule by
corporation and guilty if a wealthy corporation says you are. Laws
that sneak around legal due process are not a good thing in a
democracy, particularly when there's already a very lengthy history of
copyright abuse by actors ranging from outright trolls such as
Righthaven to supposedly reputable movie studios and record labels.

SOPA and PIPA aren't dead. The most important thing we can do in 2012
is see that they become dead. I wish I could predict some useful
intellectual property reform for the next year (or even the next
decade), but right now that train is heading in the wrong direction.
A few bloggers have opined that we'll get patent reform when the big
players realize that intensifying patent wars are counterproductive.
I wish I could believe that.

Now to happier thoughts:

Speech

I was talking to Brady Forrest a few weeks ago, and I asked "what do
you think the most important new thing is?" He said immediately
"speech interfaces, because of Siri." And my reaction was
"D'oh. Should have thought of that myself." I'm not terribly
impressed by Siri. I've been using Google's voice commands for a
couple of years now, and I've yet to see an
interesting use case for Siri that Google voice commands couldn't match.
I don't particularly
need my mobile devices to talk back to me. But Brady is absolutely
right, that Siri, backed by Apple's fan base, has put speech
interfaces on the agenda in a way that Android hasn't.

In the long run, I don't think the winning speech applications will be
as ambitious as Siri. Having a conversation with your phone is
ultimately dull and sterile. But Siri will cause developers to push
the envelope of what's possible, and what's desirable, in a speech
interface. Speech opens up new possibilities in user interface and
user experience design; we're just at the beginning of figuring out
how to use it. A key question is whether Apple will open up APIs to
Siri, so iOS developers can play with it. But even if Siri remains
closed, companies such as Twilio (and many others; a quick Google
search showed a surprising number of companies building cloud-based
voice platforms) stand to benefit as developer rush to build voice-enabled software.

Strata 2012 — The 2012 Strata Conference, being held Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.

Deployment as a service

People have been talking about "the cloud" for a few years now.
No big deal, right? It's been a while since we've seen a startup that
wasn't built on top of a cloud vendor (usually Amazon). But there's
been a change in the past year. Heroku and VMWare's Cloud Foundry have
made huge steps in taking the pain out of deploying and managing cloud
services. Heroku isn't new, but it's greatly expanded its offerings
from Ruby on Rails to include Node.js, Java, Python and more. Cloud Foundry is a new open source product that runs everywhere from
laptops to commercial clouds, and supports a similar set of
application frameworks.

How is this different, and where is it leading us? Deployment has
always been the bête noire of web (and now mobile) development. It's
easy to get something running on your laptop; a lot harder to get it
running properly on your servers; and even harder to get it running in
"the cloud," where everything is happening via remote control, as it
were. If Heroku and Cloud Foundry succeed in making deployment of
complex applications to the cloud as simple as deploying the
application on your laptop, that will lead to a major change in the
way cloud computing is used. Simplifying cloud deployment for complex
real-world applications is obviously much more difficult in practice
than in demo, but I hope they succeed. They're calling this "platform
as a service" (PAAS), but I think it's a step farther. Deployment as
a service?

Services, not apps

A while ago, I was talking to a mobile app developer who made an
important comment. All the noise over whether you make more money
selling apps for iOS or for Android was meaningless. Unless you have a
mega-hit, you're talking about the difference between making $1,000 or
$300, both of which are insignificant compared to the development
effort. So I asked him what his plan was, and he said "we're selling
a data service, not the app." The app is really just a
proof of concept, something to help users get their heads around the
data they're making available. What's really interesting, and what
he's betting on, is that other people will build apps on top of their
for-pay data service. That strikes me as a much more plausible
strategy for building a profitable company than buying a ticket in the
app lottery.

The social backbone

We've been saying for years that everything has to become social. But
a good six or seven years into the social networking phenomenon, there's
really not much that's social, particularly if you look
at enterprise software.

There's a good reason for that: social networks aren't easy to build.
It's not trivial for a company to make itself into the "next
Facebook," particularly if it's really interested in selling
clothing. Amazon, with its reviews and reviewer pages, may come
closest, but you'd never mistake Amazon for a "social" site.

Google+ is a general
framework for "socialness," automatically integrated with all of
Google's other features. If you want to build "social" into your
ecommerce application, you no longer need to build your own Facebook:
Google will deliver it, complete with well-staffed datacenters. And
since Google itself is increasingly built on Google+ services,
building on top of Google+ will be nothing less than integrating with
Google itself.

Is that the not-so-hidden downside? Google certainly wants your data,
and will put it to use. And if you
get in bed with an elephant, you've got to worry about what happens
when it rolls over. But Google strikes me as a more reliable,
consistent partner for this kind of enterprise than the alternatives.
Regardless of what I think, though, this year we'll
see Social as a Service. Google-powered.

Microsoft gets its game back

I'm not a huge follower of the Microsoft borg, and certainly not a
fan. And it's not news to anyone reading this that
Microsoft has been something of a paper tiger over the past
decade. However, one thing that I've noticed about Microsoft over the
years is that it's a company that doesn't stop trying, and it's a
company that can be surprisingly nimble when its life depends on it.
I remember Microsoft trying to figure out how to package Internet
services with Windows back in the early '90s. There were four
successive strategies, within a period of about eight months, until Microsoft
finally hit upon the right one, which was bundling Internet capability
with the operating system. You might say that bundling Internet with
Windows was the obvious right choice, and it should have done
that first. Yeah, but it didn't, and hindsight is always 20/20.

Here's what I learned: Unlike many large companies, Microsoft realized
it had made a mistake, fixed it, and kept fixing it until it got
it right. Would AT&T do that? Would Oracle do that? Hey, would
Apple do that? (Before you answer that last question, just
contemplate the word "antenna" for a few minutes.)

So it's never wise to count Microsoft out. Starting with Windows 8, with a
possibly revolutionary new interface design, continuing with the release
of new Windows Mobile phones from Nokia, continuing to push more
developers to Azure — this is clearly a big year. Microsoft has a lot to
accomplish, or it'll be relegated to the dustbin of cyberhistory.
But counting Microsoft out is always a mistake. It'll be back in
the game.

As Tim O'Reilly
has pointed out, one of the major problems with SOPA and PIPA is that they regulate in favor of an "old economy," and
against the new. It's sort of like the stage coach companies lobbying
for regulations against the upstart railroads, and the railroads lobbying for regulation against the roads and
airlines.

The problem isn't "piracy" or "theft." In fact, one of the
big problems I have is the way the old media companies have been able
to drive the language here. As Tim points out, piracy is
"primarily the result of market failure" and ceases to be an issue
when it's possible for customers to get what they want on terms that
they can accept. It's about access, it's about people being able to
get the media they want and do what they want with it.

In "
Scarcity is a Shitty Business Model," Fred Wilson tells about being unable
to find a good movie to watch at home on a weekend night: nothing good
on Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, or the cable company. The end
result is predictable: if the established means of
distribution make it difficult for customers to get what they want,
you can't blame the customers. If we've learned anything from the
Internet, it's the business that can't deliver the goods doesn't deserve
to survive.

Which begs a big question: If the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and their bedfellows are 20th century dinosaurs, when will we see the 21st century mammals that will
replace them? We're starting to see them now, particularly in music.
Musicians have already been screwed badly by the music industry, and
there are no small number of reasonably successful small musicians
working on a "pay what you like" DRM-free basis.
Businesses like Bandcamp
allow artists to sell directly to their
audiences, on a "name your price" basis. Bandcamp isn't Sony Music, but
it's one of the new breed, one of the small mammals that will
survive when the dinosaurs go extinct.

When will we see the same for the movie industry? Granted, making a
movie requires a much bigger upfront investment. But it's Hollywood's
lie that a move needs a multi-million-dollar budget. "The Blair Witch
Project" was produced for around $60,000 but grossed $249 million. Wikipedia
lists successful films with production budgets down to
$7,000. But what we don't have for low-budget films are studios
willing to take the risk of dealing directly with customers, or
companies like Bandcamp that aggregate independents' offerings and
distribute them directly to customers, cutting the obsolete 20th
century distribution channels out of the loop.

In short, SOPA and PIPA are attempts by the MPAA to preserve an
industry that has been fundamentally unchanged since the 1950s, if not
the 40s. Who's going to re-think video, in short (YouTube),
medium (TV) and long (film) form, and other forms that we haven't even
conceived? The Internet has created more new
industries than I can count. It's time for the Internet to create the
new industry that puts the old-time studios out of business. Who's
going to do that? It's a huge opportunity.

January162012

There are many arguments against SOPA and PIPA that are based on the potential harm they will do to the Internet. (There's a comprehensive outline of those arguments here.) At O'Reilly, we argue that they are also bad for the content industries that have proposed them, and bad industrial policy as a whole.

The term "piracy" implies that the wide availability of unauthorized copies of copyrighted content is the result of bad actors preying on the legitimate market. But history teaches us that it is primarily a
result of market failure, the unwillingness or inability of existing companies to provide their product at a price or in a manner that potential customers want. In the 19th century, British authors like
Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope railed against piracy by American publishers, who republished their works by re-typesetting "early sheets" obtained by whatever method possible. Sometimes these works were authorized, sometimes not. In an 1862 letter to the Athenaeum, Fletcher Harper, co-founder of American publisher Harper Brothers, writing in reply to Anthony Trollope's complaint that his company had published an unauthorized edition of Trollope's novel Orley Farm,noted:

"In the absence of an international copyright, a system has grown up in this country which though it may not be perfect still secures to authors more money than any other system that can be devised in the present state of the law.... We cannot consent to its overthrow till some better plan shall have been devised."

America went on to become the largest market in the world for copyrighted content.

That is exactly the situation today. At O'Reilly, we have published ebooks DRM-free for the better part of two decades. We've watched the growth of this market from its halting early stages to its robust growth today. More than half of our ebook sales now come from overseas, in markets we were completely unable to serve in print. While our books appear widely on unauthorized download sites, our legitimate sales are exploding. The greatest force in reporting unauthorized copies to us is our customers, who value what we do and want us to succeed. Yes, there is piracy, but our embrace of the internet's unparalleled ability to reach new customers "though it may not be perfect still secures to authors more money than any other system that can be devised."

The solution to piracy must be a market solution, not a government intervention, especially not one as ill-targeted as SOPA and PIPA. We already have laws that prohibit unauthorized resale of copyrighted material, and forward-looking content providers are developing products, business models, pricing, and channels that can and will eventually drive pirates out of business by making content readily available at a price consumers want to pay, and that ends up growing
the market.

Policies designed to protect industry players who are unwilling or unable to address unmet market needs are always bad policies. They retard the growth of new business models, and prop up inefficient companies. But in the end, they don't even help the companies they try to protect. Because those companies are trying to preserve old business models and pricing power rather than trying to reach new customers, they ultimately cede the market not to pirates but to
legitimate players who have more fully embraced the new opportunity. We've already seen this story play out in the success of Apple and Amazon. While the existing music companies were focused on fighting file sharing, Apple went on to provide a compelling new way to buy and enjoy music, and became the largest music retailer in the world. While book publishers have been fighting the imagined threat of piracy, Amazon, not pirates, has become the biggest threat to their business by offering authors an alternative way to reach the market without recourse to their former gatekeepers.

Hollywood too, has a history of fighting technologies, such as the VCR, which developed into a larger market than the one the industry was originally trying to protect.

In short, SOPA and PIPA not only harm the internet, they support existing content companies in their attempt to hold back innovative business models that will actually grow the market and deliver new
value to consumers.